Book Review: 'This is How You Lose Her' by Junot Diaz

All apologies as published in the September 2012 issue of MORE

by Pam Houston

Photograph: Avery Powell

This is How You Lose Her (Riverhead) reacquaints us with Yunior, the lovable, stiletto-tongued, sexually voracious boy from Junot Díaz’s first book, Drown, who believed that his Dominican heritage meant he could never be faithful. Now Yunior is older. He writes books and teaches college. And he is engaged to a woman he realizes is the love of his life just after she learns he’s cheated on her with 50—50!—women. In signature Díaz prose, strong voiced and evocative, these stories look back to the family’s arrival in America; to the numbing days surrounding the death of Yunior’s brother; to the women who preceded his fiancée; and to the years of self-torture Yunior endures until realizing in his “lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”